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Bored Apes Manufacturer Yuga Labs Acquires CryptoPunks NFT Collection

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Bored Apes Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs announced on Friday that they have acquired the rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from creator Larva Labs.

Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the two most valuable NFT collections by market capitalization, with a combined value of at least around $3.6 billion at current prices. Yuga Labs has been rumored to be in fundraising talks for the past few months, but hasn’t made any official announcements.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT are owned by members of the community, but the intellectual property rights to the characters have long (and ambiguously) been owned by the creators of the projects. With this announcement, Yuga Labs has signaled that it will grant full commercial rights to NFTs to individual owners; In particular, they won’t be transferring all copyrights, but it’s a step further than Larva Labs has ever done, and it’s something the owners have long wished for.

“We have long admired CryptoPunks and the work of founders Matt and John. They have moved NFTs and the broader crypto world forward and we are honored to carry the brands they have built into the future we are building at Yuga.” tweet from the Yuga Labs Twitter account.

The CryptoPunks project was launched in 2017 with 10,000 NFTs claimed by users for free; it is generally considered one of the earliest NFT projects and one of the most influential. In late 2020, prices for pixelated portraits began to skyrocket, with the rarest selling for millions of dollars and the cheapest now selling for nearly $200,000. In May 2021, the founders of Larva Labs launched a follow-up project called Meebits that brought in tens of millions of dollars in initial sales within hours of launch.

At this point, the founders of Larva Labs have almost completely exited the project, with Yuga Labs detailing in a blog post that they have also acquired 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits from the company, leaving the founders with only a few of each in addition to their generative art project Autoglyphs. which was not part of the deal.

Yuga Labs has taken a more aggressive route to actively building the Bored Apes project community by revealing partnerships.

“However, this is not an acquisition of Larva Labs… As for what’s coming next, we never talk about it until it’s ready, but overall we’re excited to be back on what we do best, which is work over strange novelties,” the founders of Larva Labs said in a blog post.